OF SELBORNE. 133 



Your method of accounting for the periodical motions of 

 the British singing birds, or birds of flight, is a very probable 

 one ; since the matter of food is a great regulator of the 

 actions and proceedings of the brute creation : there is but 

 one that can be set in competition with it, and that is love. 

 But I cannot quite acquiesce with you in one circumstance 

 when you advance that, " when they have thus feasted, they 

 " again separate into small parties of five or six, and get the 

 " best fare they can within a certain district, having no 

 " inducement to go in quest of fresh-turned earth." Now if 

 you mean that the business of congregating is quite at an end 

 from the conclusion of wheat-sowing to the season of barley 

 and oats, it is not the case with us ; for larks and chaffinches, 

 and particularly linnets, flock and congregate as much in the 

 very dead of winter as when the husbandman is busy with his 

 ploughs and harrows. 



Sure there can be no doubt but that woodcocks and field- 

 fares leave us in the spring, in order to cross the seas, and 

 to retire to some districts more suitable to the purpose of 

 breeding. That the former pair before they retire, and that 

 the hens are forward with egg, I myself, when I was a sports- 

 man, have often experienced. It cannot indeed be denied but 

 that now and then we hear of a woodcock's nest, or young 

 birds, discovered in some part or other of this island: but 

 then they are always mentioned as rarities, and somewhat out 

 of the common course of things : but as to redwings and 

 fieldfares, no sportsman or naturalist has ever yet, that I could 

 hear, pretended to have found the nest or young of those 

 species in any part of these kingdoms. And I the more ad- 

 mire at this instance as extraordinary, since, to all appear- 

 ance, the same food in summer as well as in winter might 

 support them here which maintains their congeners, the black- 

 birds and thrushes, did they chuse to stay the summer through. 

 From hence it appears that it is not food alone which deter- 

 mines some species of birds with regard to their stay or de- 

 parture. Fieldfares and redwings disappear sooner or later 

 according as the warm weather comes on earlier or later. 

 For I well remember, after that dreadful winter of 1739-40, 



